Crashing Back to Desktop

[slaughteredlamb]

Anyone know what might be causing this?

We have 3 or 4 batch files on our computers that do various things from creating unique ID numbers to logging on remote drives. All of these have worked perfectly happily for a number of years without incident. However one of our Windows XP machines has recently stopped liking any batch files whatsoever.

If I try to run any batch file then any window that was open closes, the taskbar and desktop icons all disappear for a second to two and then reappear and I'm back at the Windows desktop, although any programs that were open remain running but minimized. The same thing happens if I simply right click on a batch file and select edit.

I've tried renaming the batch files, copying them to a different drive, deleting them and re-installing them etc etc but nothing seems to work.

Anyone come across this in the past or know what might cause this to happen?

[Whatever]

Is there anything of interest in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > Application?

Sometimes you'll find issues logged in there.

[slaughteredlamb]

Hmm seems to be a problem with explorer shell.

Source: Winlogon
Event ID:1002
Error: "The shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted

Also noticed that we also can't launch the Command Prompt either 

[Mr Anderson]

Try this (for XP/2K): open Regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced look for the value "SeparateProcess" and double click it, change the DWORD to 1 which should make the shell and Explorer run as separate processes, so if Explorer crashes the Windows shell shouldn't, and vice versa.

If it's already set at that then I'm stumped.

[slaughteredlamb]

Turns out it was due to 27 Trojans being found on the PC! 

Getting Kaspersky to kill them has got it all working again nicely